I personally think that birth rates are low because the nuclear family is a less than one century old social construct that was manufactured and exported to replace the traditional community-based method of childrearing and it’s actually way worse at the goal of “producing more humans”
I don't think the goal should be producing more (or fewer) humans than however many kids people freely choose to have. The whole idea of treating it like some kind of thing to be technocratically managed with a particular goal in mind is creepy and illiberal.
I feel like this is a good lesson to draw from the fact that there are two entire things called the Repugnant Conclusion, one of which says that we're obliged to maximize the number of humans, the other to minimize it
I think a lot of that comes from the fertilty rate being a deceptively simple way to address the very real impacts that a declining and aging population has on a country/society/economy. It’s a lot more palatable to a lot of folks compared to mass immigration or overhauling elder care and welfare
I think when people are trying to procreate they should be required to wear a helmet.
Alas, I don't have anywhere to put my "Bicyclists do it while wearing a helmet" bumper sticker.
some measure of trying to influence (as opposed to control) those free choices seems OK, but most tools of state seem pretty poorly adapted to that end. and "more intrusive" definitely won't equate to "more effective."
Very true See Ceausescu, Nicolae
I mean it’s also way worse for humanity in most other ways and is perhaps one of the biggest factors which created the low trust/high anxiety social environment we’re currently being forced to live in, but because the topic was about birthrate I focused on how it’s bad for that
in fact I think the fact that we’re discussing this issue using the technocratic framing of “not enough humans are being produced” instead of the human-first framing of “people are being unjustly robbed of love and happiness” exists downstream of the nuclear family’s destruction of community
I think the best framing for this issue is just to say that we shouldn’t punish people financially for the choice to have children - maybe that framing is not 100% accurate but it’s mostly there and it also keeps the focus on freedom instead of technocratic control.
it’s quite frankly insane that we’ve managed to turn having a child into a financial transaction akin to purchasing a car within the space of a single human lifetime but nobody has even really noticed that it happened
free choices don’t exist in a vacuum and we can’t create a vacuum for them to exist in. pretending we don’t have natal policy is not the same as not having natal policy- you can’t take a pass on it any more than you can take a pass on industrial policy.
But consider an analogy: Every state action may have some tiny effect on the degree and direction of public religious practice. That fact doesn’t commit us to saying, “Ah well, since we’ve gotta endorse anyway, you’re all officially Baptists.”
I don’t think that analogy works unless we were trying to mandate childbearing? which I am extremely not.
but yeah I think it’s legitimate to make some state and societal decisions to support Religious Practice writ large. maybe we could take a couple days off every week and if people wanted to go to church on one of them they could?
I think you might be missing the analogy. I’m very much saying that there’s a continuum here, as with religious practice and religious policy.
Ok; I don’t think everyone should be Baptists and I don’t think everyone should have kids. But I do think that some couples who have and want kids would have *more* kids but-for, and we should take reasonable steps to remove the but-fors.
Sure, one wouldn't want to posit that just because X affects Y, it's necessary to make X a reflective engagement with Y. But that's not relevant to US family policy, where everyone agrees specific family structures are conscious endorsed and financially incentivized.
I’m thinking about abortion rights, which I support despite their anti-natal effects. I’m also thinking about my queer family, which is currently allowed but might not be, if we do get a more explicit pro-natalist policy.
yeah I like abortion rights very much and I think we should make queer family formation easier and better supported!
I'm not sure how that's connected? The point is just that with stuff like the child and childcare tax credits, the US very clearly has a natal policy already, so the policy questions involve efficacy and efficiency rather than the broad "should this be an area of policy action at all."
I’m not sure how it’s not connected? I’ve been told my whole life that queer people depress fertility rates. If fertility is a maximand, then it follows that we should suppress queerness. At least to some degree.
(If fertility isn’t a maximand, then we can worry about other goals, like ensuring human dignity and autonomy. The pursuit of those other goals may raise or lower fertility, but we probably don’t have to worry about it.)
It can make sense to worry about all of these goals. There should always be multiple maximand.
One (hard, lots of tradeoffs) question is: what natal policy should the US have? I have no idea, although I also think abortion access and queer rights are important. The other (easier, empirical) question is: does the US currently have a natal policy, to which the answer is imo unequivocally yes.
Not really? At the margin in modern society encouraging same sex marriage and surrogacy can be a different way to increase fertility. A vastly, vastly better way imo.
But we both know that’s not how it’ll play out. If you’re among the empiricists, encouraging same sex marriage isn’t *clearly* pronatal. If you’re among the Republicans, SSM is said to deny of the basic facts of reproduction. In all I’d rather insist on human dignity and individual choice.
I get sucked into the natalist argument, but I only agree to the extent that I think children are humans who should be allowed to thrive.
Yes insisting on human dignity and individual choice is always critical and stuff like laws against abortion are always wrong. But I just am never really willing to accept "you shouldn't care about X because it might lead you to bad policy positions" arguments as a rule. I would prefer to simply
For example, any country with an income tax has to specify the tax unit (individual vs household) as well as whether and to what extent dependents affect each unit’s tax liability
so we should have the best natal policy we can have consistent with our values and our resource constraints, and as good liberals that policy centers individual reproductive freedom: people should be supported in desired children and should be supported in avoiding undesired children.
the first prong of that necessarily raises fertility at the margin compared to no state support, although as a whole the effect is ambiguous.
Nothing exists in a vacuum. But a free society means respecting some things as properly reserved for individual choice more than being the subject of state-driven planning, and reproductive freedom is one core example. And it's also relevant that none of the policy levers empirically work anyway.
There are lots of good reasons on other grounds to have e.g. child tax credit, free public education, all those sorts of things, and discussions to be had about making them more generous. But "this will increase birthrates" is neither a good reason for them nor something they actually accomplish.
The hard reality of the demographic transition, by all indications as close to an impervious iron law as anything in the social sciences, whatever marginal tinkering around the edges policy might accomplish, is vastly different from industrial and economy policy which obviously has massive effects.
The big factors which lead to declining fertility rates - greater societal wealth, increased educational attainment, greater access to birth control, increased life expectancy, etc - are functionally irreversible without some kind of genuinely apocalyptic societal collapse.
Even a birth control ban won't be able to suppress it to a degree comparable to a society before modern birth control techniques had been invented.
I mean we don’t have sylphium anymore but we know about Queen Anne’s lace and can probably retain the tech for copper coil IUD’s and animal membrane condoms even through most types of hard crash I do think some of Trump’s supporters who are OK with the tariffs are rooting for profound collapse fwiw
It has been known for quite some time that total human population is heading for a peak and likely some slow decline after that. And that entails some difficulties, some strain on our previous fiscal structures, some adjustments needed. But it's not some apocalyptic catastrophe, either.
I'm also wary of talk of underpopulation, which is really what it ultimately is, considering how recently the fad panic which had *disastrous* policy consequences was of overpopulation, Paul Ehrlich etc. When the talk was not of encouraging birthrates but of one-child policies and Malthusian crisis.
The underpopulation they are worried about are white babies. White and preferably male babies. The panic is that brown people might govern white people as brutally as white people governed brown people--heaps of projection.
There are some center and left natalists who have what I'll grant are more benign and entirely not-racist motives, but yes this stuff coming from today's populist right is a thinly veiled, if at all, racial thing. Perhaps not entirely a coincidence that natalism and nativism share their Latin root.
yeah it turns out insect population dynamics are not very instructive re human population dynamics
just from a simple standpoint, building more housing, cheap options for childcare and kid health, things the US is focusing on punishing right now...
It's within fairly recent living memory, as it turned out, vastly exaggerated fears of having the wrong total number of people produced horrific human rights abuses on a massive scale. That's reason to at the very least tread extremely carefully when we start talking of birthrates as a policy goal.